Alright! I admit it; I had a bit of a moral breakdown. Come on though, don’t we all every once and awhile? One fine evening a while back I noticed on a homebrew forum that someone posted about the Northern Brewer’s extract IIPA kit being listed for $21 at the checkout when it was priced at $55 on the product page. I had a few homebrews in me, thought about how this is probably a mistake by some internet guy they hired because there was no sale going on, decided it may be morally wrong to take advantage of said mistake and did it anyways. Long story short, I now have a IIPA kit that I don’t really want because I don’t like brewing giant beers that clog up a keg line for months. So I needed something to do. First things first, I decided definitely not to brew this beer. I made it a few years back as an extract brewer and wasn’t crazy about it. It was too malty and not hoppy enough for my tastes. So, with that decision made I needed to decide what to do with the ingredients.This is what I came up with:

Step One: Canning starter wort for future use. I used half of a six pound container of LME in two gallons of water, boiled for fifteen minutes and then added to cleaned and sanitized mason jars. Not sure if I need to boil the wort or clean and sanitize since these will boil in the pressure cooker but never hurts to be safe right? Pressure cooking jars 15PSI heats liquids to about 240* which kills everything making cans of starter work safe to use right out of the jar. It’s time consuming up front but saves time making starters in the future. It would have been less time consuming had I possessed a pressure cooker that held more than five jars at once but chalk that up to user error. Step Two: Brew IPA. I choose to do a 2.5 gallon BIAB IPA with a simple grain bill and hopped up with a mixture of Summit, Centennial and two ounces of Cascade. I mixed all of them together, averaged the Alpha Acid percentage to be about 10% and bittered with a half ounce at 60 minutes before dumping in half ounce increments at 15, 10, 5, and then a remaining 1.5 ounces at flameout for a fifteen minute aroma steep before cooling. Contrary to my road map above I decided to use some British Ale II I had bottom cropped from a Bitter (more to come on that in a few weeks). Not really to style but it was easy and cheap. Steps Three, Four and Five: To be determined. Step three begins by finding out what kind of giant beer I want to do. With a 10 gallon cooler as my mashtun I like the idea of cheating with malt extract for big beers so I don’t need to mash at a low water to grain ratio. Step four will be the Session beer with the Glacier hops. And finally step five; the three remaining pounds of LME. If I’m lazy this might go into step four. If not, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll can more starter wort but I don’t really want to do that in the near future again.

Well, at least my moral lapse is going to result in potentially four beers with enough starter wort to do a bunch of yeast starters. So, in the long run I guess I don’t feel too bad about taking advantage of a glitch in the system.